Friday, November 7, 2014

Grimm 11/7/2014

Thank you to all parents for
your flexibility during our dismissal on Wednesday, Nov. 5. Once we found out about the potential gas
leak at the high school we quickly made plans to keep your children safe. Your understanding and cooperation with the
alternate pick-up points went very well. Thank you for your help. What an
awesome example of cooperation and patience as we got students to where they
needed to be!

One of the critical pieces
in your child’s education is learning to read and understand what they have
read.Sometimes the best way to help
kids understand what they are reading is to help them make connections to the
story and to talk about it. Some
strategies that we use in school include:

Determine Important
Information

When students read, they
should pick out the most important ideas. The most important ideas are the ones
the author wants readers to remember.

Compare and Contrast

When we compare certain
things, we tell how they are alike or the same. When we contrast things, we
tell how they are different!!

Make Inferences

Making inferences helps
readers make sense of what they read. Sometimes the author doesn't tell us
everything we need to understand. We can use clues in the story and what we
already know to help fill in gaps, which the author has left in the text. This
is called MAKING INFERENCES!

Identify Text Structure

Stories are set up in
different ways. They usually are told in sequence, or the order in which events
happen. Knowing how a story is set up, or its structure, can help a reader
remember the story.

Identify Details & Facts

Finding small bits of
information that tells us more about important ideas.

Making Predictions

Using clues from the story
and what you already know to guess what will happen next.

Summarize

Tell in your own words what
has happened in the story or text.

Ask and Answer Questions

Asking questions and looking
for answers in the text or pictures will help you to understand what you read!

Facts and Opinions

Facts can be proven! They
are TRUE!

Opinions are people's
thoughts. They might not be true! When giving an opinion, you might hear
"I think...."

Monitor Comprehension

Stop and think about what
you are reading. Are you understanding what you are reading? If not, use an
accuracy strategy to help.

Recall and Retell

Tell about the setting,
characters and most important events in the beginning, middle, and end of the
text. Readers gain a better understanding of what a story is about when they
can recall events from a story.

Make Connections

Use what you already know to
understand what you are reading. We use text to text connections. We use text
to self connections. And we use text to world connections.

"The passion for
learning is not something you have to inspire kids to have; it’s something you
have to keep from extinguishing.”~Unknown

Preschool

This week our preschoolers
continued to investigate pumpkins and other fall crops. The students were able
to look at and compare pumpkins, gourds, and Indian corn. In the discovery
center some students were able to use small hammers and golf tees to pound
designs into pumpkins. The students also helped carve a pumpkin into a
Jack-o-Lantern. They decided which shapes to use to make the face and then they
helped clean out the inside of the pumpkin.

As a district preschool
program we have come up with three expectations as part of PBIS
(Positive Behavior Interventions Supports) that will be used in every
preschool classroom. The three expectations are Be Kind, Be Safe, and Be
Respectful. Over the next few weeks the preschool teachers and students will
discuss what each of these expectations mean and how they would look in our
classroom. The students will help come up with rules for the classroom and
parts of our day that fall under each of these expectations.

Mrs. Marr’s classroom had
their 5th grade buddy class come to visit last week. The buddies read together,
painted a picture, and shared a snack.

Kindergarten

Kindergarten started to talk
about hibernation this week. Angela Breis, Howard County Naturalist, presented “Animals in Winter”. The children learned the three ways
animals survive the winter months. The animals migrate, adapt, or
hibernate. All kindergarten students will hear this presentation.

Some kindergarten students
are brushing up on their Skype skills with Mrs. Shekleton.

Kindergarten students love
taking books off of the shelf and reading them. They have done a lot of talking and training regarding how to handle a
book, what it looks like to read a book (read the pictures, read the words, or
retell the story from memory). They love
reading!

First Grade

Many first grade students
have been given the opportunity to “show what they know”.They are helping their friends to learn
things.Here some students are learning from
each other how to record their inquiry projects using Showbie.

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